If you only have time for one summary of what happened in AI during 2024, Simon Willison's is the one to read.
I've read several summaries of AI developments that happened during 2024. Simon Willison's overview stands out as the best. Why? Because Willison begins with technological advancements, but then he delves into what these developments and achievements mean for organizations and individuals.
Though it's a lengthy article, I highly recommend taking the time to read it. At minimum, be sure to read these two sections: LLMs Somehow Got Even Harder to Use and Knowledge Is Incredibly Unevenly Distributed:
A drum I’ve been banging for a while is that LLMs are power-user tools—they’re chainsaws disguised as kitchen knives. They look deceptively simple to use—how hard can it be to type messages to a chatbot?—but in reality you need a huge depth of both understanding and experience to make the most of them and avoid their many pitfalls.
If anything, this problem got worse in 2024.
We’ve built computer systems you can talk to in human language, that will answer your questions and usually get them right! ... depending on the question, and how you ask it, and whether it’s accurately reflected in the undocumented and secret training set.
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What are we doing about this? Not much. Most users are thrown in at the deep end. The default LLM chat UI is like taking brand new computer users, dropping them into a Linux terminal and expecting them to figure it all out.